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Letty said, “Back when we were dealing with Harp, he said there was a guy at the center of Ordinary People. Said he was nuts... Craig Sovern?”
“Craig... He’s a little off-center, I guess. Yeah, and he’s a savant. Got OCD, pretty bad. He’s a good guy, though.”
“Here’s the thing,” Letty told Able. “We talked to Annie Bellado, and we didn’t tell her this, but we think her friend Daniel... He’s missing and we went to his apartment, did some social work on the manager, and got inside. There was blood on the floor. We think the Russians got him and he’s probably dead. We think they’re taking down Ordinary People because of the train ransomware. It’s not only revenge—they want to take down anyone who might go after the trains again, right when they’re about to invade Ukraine. We need to warn this Sovern guy.”
“Ah, Jesus, I gotta get out of here,” Able said, looking around the place, as if the Russian army might be coming through the doors.
“Your friends William and Melody are heading for Las Vegas, last we heard,” Letty said. “Maybe you could call them, see what they’ve got set up.”
Able bobbed his head, looked around his house. “Vegas sounds... okay, I guess. Better than anything I’ve thought of.”
“I dunno. If you can’t hide in LA, you can’t hide,” Cartwright said. “You could probably hide six blocks away, as long as you didn’t come back here. These guys aren’t the FBI or the NSA, they’re crooks.”
Baxter: “Russian intelligence must be involved somehow, if they’re going after the train people. Why would gangsters care about that, if all they were, were gangsters?”
“You’ve got a point,” Cartwright conceded.
“Anyway, could you call somebody about this Craig Sovernguy, find out where he is?” Letty asked. “He doesn’t answer his phone. If he was big in Ordinary People, he’ll be a target.”
“Yeah, yeah... This can’t go on too long. I got six grand in the bank,” Able said. “Vegas will eat that up in three weeks, even staying in a dump.”
Baxter shrugged, waved a hand at the box of Intel chips. “Take the box. We got more where that came from.”
Able brightened: “Seriously? That’ll make a difference. I can hide out for six months on that.”
Able called his friend Jan, the bass player, who Letty and Baxter knew from the meeting at Able’s and had seen again at Poggers. On the phone, Able said “uh-huh” a couple of times, made some notes on a yellow legal pad, agreed with Jan that they should both get out of sight. When he rang off, he handed the legal pad to Letty.
“He lives in Oxnard. On a boat called theGreen Flash, in a private marina at the Motel California.”
“Get me online for a minute, we want to look at Google Earth,” Baxter said. Able lit up one of his desktop computers and they found the Motel California on the north side of Oxnard. The harbor on the ocean side of the motel had two dozen slips, all of them with sailboats. They looked at a street view of the front of the place—long low motel with an orange vacancy sign and twenty doors facing a parking lot—and shut down the computer.
“We’re going,” Letty told Able. “And you should get lost.”
“I’ll call you when I get to Vegas,” Able said. “When I unload these chips, I’ll call everyone who knows about Ordinary People and get some hideout money to them.”
“Great,” Letty said. “Give us a little credit for it.”
They left the box of chips with Able, followed a navigation app to the 101 freeway and took it north and west.
“Boat seems like a strange place for a guy with OCD,” Baxter said. “It’d always be moving around, stuff would get jumbled up.”
“Actually, a sailboat would be the perfect place,” Cartwright said. “You gotta be a little OCD just to sail. The best sailors are really OCD—nothing can be too well adjusted for them. Everything is tied down. Always with appropriate knots. It’s the fussiest hobby in the world.”
“You sail?” Letty asked.
“I have, yeah. I’ve got some friends down in Annapolis, they’ve got a sailboat. You ought to come along sometime,” Cartwright said.
“Not me,” Baxter said. “Worst environment in the world for computers.”
“That might be true for computers in general, but I’ll tell you, on new boats, it’s one marine computer after another, front to back. It’s all fly-by-wire now.”
They talked fora few minutes, locked into the scarlet stream of weaving taillights getting out of LA, then Cartwright, in the backseat, said she was going to take a nap. Letty yawned and said, “Good idea.”
“Go ahead,” Baxter said. “I’m fine.”
Letty dozed in the passenger seat, with the usual jerky half-waking dreams people have when they sleep in a truck, waking again when they came down to city streets and a stoplight. Cartwright woke at the same time, yawned, cracked her knuckles, and asked, “Are we there?”
“We’re in Oxnard, a few more miles to the motel,” Baxter said. “You guys were down for almost an hour.”
